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Howie Choset

Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon

Howie Choset is a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. Motivated by applications in confined spaces, Choset has created a comprehensive program in snake robots, which has led to basic research in mechanism design, path planning, motion planning, and estimation. These research topics are important because once the robot is built (design), it must decide where to go (path planning), determine how to get there (motion planning) and use feedback to close the loop (estimation). By pursuing the fundamentals, this research program has made contributions to coverage tasks, dynamic climbing, and mapping large spaces. Already, Choset has directly applied this body of work to challenging and strategically significant problems in diverse areas such as surgery, manufacturing, infrastructure inspection, and search and rescue. He directs the Undergraduate Robotics Minor at Carnegie Mellon and teaches an overview course on Robotics which uses series of custom developed Lego Labs to complement the course work. Professor Choset’s students have won best paper awards at the RIA in 1999 and ICRA in 2003, he has been nominated for best papers at ICRA in 1997 and IROS in 2003 and 2007, won best paper at IEEE Bio Rob in 2006, and won best video at ICRA 2010. In 2002 the MIT Technology Review elected Choset as one of its top 100 innovators in the world under 35. In 2005, MIT Press published a textbook, lead authored by Choset, entitled Principles of Robot Motion. Recently, Choset co-founded a company called Cardiorobotics which makes a small surgical snake robot for minimally invasive surgery.

Past Programs Featuring Howie Choset

Participants

Kubi Ackerman is the Director of the Future City Lab at the Museum of the City of New York. Ackerman has been conducting design-based research in New York City since 2004. His work focuses on urban design strategies for resilience, with a particular focus on urban food systems, green infrastructure, transportation, and energy.

Recognized mathematician and science writer Amir D. Aczel is the author of numerous books that have appeared on various bestseller lists in the United States and abroad, with translations into 22 languages. Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider is his most recent literary contribution.

Dany Spencer Adams explores how ions moving among cells act as signals during regeneration, development, and cancer. She has uncovered evidence that bioelectric signals can trigger and regulate diverse complex processes that include gene expression changes.

Apoorv Agarwal is a fourth year doctoral student in the Computer Science department at Columbia University, New York City. His areas of interest and specialization are Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.

Dr. Bhavna Agrawal, a leading researcher at IBM, is bringing education and artificial intelligence technology together to help solve various problems in elementary and higher education. Some of her latest work involved working with automatic recognition of children’s speech.